The second question one approaches with some hesitation. "No moralist," writes Professor Sidgwick, [Footnote: _The Methods of Ethics_, Introduction.] "has ever directed an individual to promote the virtue of others except in so far as this promotion is compatible with, or rather involved in, the complete realization of virtue in himself." It appears rash to admit to be a duty that which as high an authority as Sidgwick maintains no moralist has ever ventured to advise. Still, it is permissible to adduce an illustration taken from actual life, and to ask the reader to form his opinion independently. A girl, anxious to provide her younger sister with a better lot, enters a factory and gives up her life to labor of a monotonous and mind- destroying character, amid sordid and more or less degrading surroundings. The act is a heroic one, but is it clear that it conduces to the self-realization, not of the sister, but of the agent herself? The influence of surroundings counts for much. High impulses may, under such pressure, come to be repressed. "Capacity for the nobler feelings," writes Mill, [Footnote: _Utilitarianism_, chapter iii] "is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favorable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones they are any longer capable of enjoying." In other words, one may put oneself into a situation in which self- realization appears to be made a most difficult and problematic goal. Nor does it seem inconceivable that one should do this for the sake of another's good. Hence, even if we restrict the meaning of the word "self- sacrifice" to the sacrifice of the "real" or moral self, the impossibility of self-sacrifice scarcely appears to have been proved; the impossibility of a conflict between the ends of the individual and of society does not appear to be indubitably established.